It would be great to have entities in the messages in both ways. This doesn't exist, or we haven't found a service that has this :) :) :)

It's incredible, if you need your own chat platform/channel/widget (this means the UX and communications) in a web, Android or iOS for your bot this is the only professional solution for developers existing on the market. At least I have never seen, in the last year and after a big research something like Smooch. Read more for a long explanation.

- Problem:

If you are thinking in chatbots in your web without social media players, or in you App in Android or iOS, your chat must have the next capabilities:

- Enriched messages like quick replies or buttons.

- SDK

- Full customization

- Scalability

- Security

You can integrate a chat with a lot of services and they have SDK and more, but they are adapted for human chat (Zendesk or LiveChat for example), not for bots, this means that they won't qualify for bot development.

In other hand you can find bot platforms that offer their own channel, forcing to use the whole solution and it's limitations. If you are thinking on a bot more complex than a bot that tells you "hello, call this number", this is something to take into consideration. Moreover, the best bot platforms for developers have partnerships with Smooch and the integration is direct.

- Solution:

You have two alternative if you need your own platform in a web, Android or iOS for your bot:

1. You could develop your own chat channel, their backend, solve the problem of synchronism, concurrence, memory, create the web SDK with their CSS, create the Android SDK, etc, etc, etc.

2. Put Smooch.io in your live.

If your aren't Google, Facebook, Salesforce or Amazon, don't hesitate! you should take option 2.

1. Wish there was a way to intercept messages from the business systems before the message is delivered to the customer

At Sciensio, we have been using Smooch from the start, and view them as a integral part of our award winning Event Chatbot solution. During the last 18 months besides having great technology everyone we have interacted with has been fabulous to work with. They have had some valuable input about how to achieve our goals.

Thanks for the Hunt @chrismessina! @gozmike may not have seen this since he is overseas, so I thought I'd chime in. We have long had an offer on the market for helpdesks, crm and live chat software to easily integrate with the world's messaging channels through a unified API. We've also previously launched a suite of embeddable messenger SDKs for web, iOS and Android. Over the years we had bot platforms and builders using our APIs and SDKs for a build once deploy everywhere channel infrastructure. Based on feedback from these early adopters - init.ai (now Apple, motion.ai (Hubspot), Meya, Sciensio, Commons, etc -we decided to make it even easier for bot makers with this new offer that provides (i) channel access (FB, Twitter, WeChat, Line, Telegram, Viber, Kakao, SMS, SDKs and Apple Biz Chat and WhatsApp upon their GA) - when launched, (ii) multi channel rich message translation plus our conversation extensions (aka web views or mini apps) to optimize the end user experience, (iii) access to user profiles, context and conversation history in order to feed AI and enable personalized bot interactions - we look forward to seeing some intelligent slot filling use cases be deployed!, and critically (iv) bot to human handoffs with all our service cloud integration partners, because we love humans as much as bots! Look forward to seeing what you all build!

As a customer for almost 2 years, I highly recommend the Smooch platform. Using Smooch enabled our Engineering team to focus on the business features that delivered value to our customers.
If you are have questions about the platform or the experience of working with Smooch please feel free to reach out. I am happy to share what we have learned.

@chris_colleran Do you think as a solo developer for now, I can benefit of their Labs offering, or should I focus my efforts on defining business logic/needs and handing the project to an expert freelance team like yours at Sciensio?